A certain class of telecommunication services is known as “follow-me” services. A follow-me telephone number, for example, allows a user to roam to different locations and to still receive incoming phone calls directed to the follow-me telephone number.
An example of a follow-me service is the one provided by Vonage, Inc. (see vonage.com). Vonage, Inc. supplies users with voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony services. A user can select one or more telephone numbers (Vonage™ numbers) in one or more local area codes to receive telephone calls. All telephone calls to the one or more local numbers get forwarded to the user via the Internet to a small VoIP (voice-over-Internet protocol) gateway that sits on the user's desktop. If the user travels to a different location, takes his/her VoIP gateway with him/her, and plugs the VoIP gateway via an Ethernet cable into a broadband Internet connection at the new location, the user can receive telephone calls directed to any of his/her Vonage™ numbers at a telephone connected to the VoIP gateway.
The above technology would allow, for example, a user residing in Costa Rica to receive telephone calls that were directed to a Miami (305) telephone number (e.g., a Vonage™ number using a Miami based point of presence). Now if the user were to travel to Spain and carry his/her equipment along, after re-installation of the Vonage™ desktop VoIP gateway, the user would then be able to receive telephone calls directed to the same Miami telephone number, but this time, the calls would be routed across the Internet to Spain instead of Costa Rica.
While this service is useful and beneficial, it has drawbacks. First of all, it is limited to VoIP connections which may be unreliable in terms of quality. Also, the user is required to carry a desktop VoIP gateway (sometimes called an “adapter”) to the new location, find a broadband Internet connection, and plug the desktop VoIP gateway into it, e.g., via an Ethernet cable. In practice, due to differences in local system and home or office router configurations and/or the type of broadband Internet connection (e.g., DSL vs. cable modem), and whether a local router is even available, the re-installation can be non-trivial and may require calls to technical service to complete. In general, un-plugging and re-plugging can be more complicated than desired due to such differences in local network configurations. Moreover, the user is required to carry the desktop VoIP gateway and this can be cumbersome and puts the gateway at risk of loss, theft, or damage during travel.
Similar re-installation problems occur for systems where a telephone device and the VoIP desktop gateway are built into a single handset. Electrically, this is effectively the same type of system; while it is slightly more portable, the same re-installation problems tend to occur when plugged into different local networks having different local network configurations.
What is needed is a more portable solution that allows a user to move from location to location without loss of access to a personalized set of data, application, and/or telecommunications services, to accept or divert incoming calls, and/or to make outgoing calls using a telecommunication services account without the need to carry a desktop VoIP gateway or VoIP handset from one location to another. It would also be desirable to have a solution that were general enough to work with both VoIP based telecommunication services and also standard landline and/or cellular telecommunication services, as well as network-based (e.g., Internet-based) data and/or application services.